4.3 The Lonely Clock

The enemy is revealed and Jago and Litefoot are on a train to nowhere. Can Leela and Ellie save them, in a race against the clock?

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Styre
on July 8, 2017 at 5:59 AM

JAGO & LITEFOOT: THE LONELY CLOCK

Matthew Sweet is one of my favorite writers in the Big Finish stable: he captures the characters incredibly well, he has a knack for intriguing plots, and his scripts are always literary but never try to show off. Here, in “The Lonely Clock,” he’s channeling “The Secret Agent” by Joseph Conrad as well as the Hitchcock adaptations that followed. But that’s just the background to a fascinating story in which Jago and Litefoot find themselves trapped on an Underground train endlessly traveling in a loop, devoid of passengers, and accompanied by a mysterious woman. Simultaneously, Leela and Ellie search for them, aided by the same woman. The woman, Winnie (Victoria Alcock), just murdered her husband – but she didn’t, she was just tricked into thinking she did. It’s all part of a scheme by Hardwick and Kempston – and a spatio-temporal discontinuity generator – to put Winnie in two places at once. But there’s no grand scheme at work here, no universe-spanning threat: they’re doing it because they want to attract the attention of the one person who would never permit such shenanigans. That person, of course, is the mysterious Professor Claudius Dark, finally revealed here as the sixth Doctor all along. What impresses me most about this story is the way it hangs together flawlessly while maintaining such an effective, eerie atmosphere. This is a story in which the characters are constantly a step behind, and Lisa Bowerman’s directing captures this feeling quite well – the opening scene in particular is strikingly effective. I’m very curious to see how this series wraps up – the Doctor almost never appears in the spinoff series, after all – but even if that story is a step down, I still got to experience “The Lonely Clock,” which is excellent.